A call for civil discourse

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Journalism should be unbiased and factual, and we work hard to present local news content in this way, making sure that each of the many facts we state in our small weekly newspaper is accurate.

For instance, in this week’s paper, you’ll read stories about complex real estate transactions, the budgets of public agencies and a serious criminal charge against a local man. We’ve painstakingly fact-checked these articles with official sources.

We know we need to get things right — our credibility is at stake each time we go to press. And when we err, as we inevitably do from time to time, we print corrections, because facts are the essence of what we do here.

This newspaper also provides a format for opinion in the form of editorials written by our staff in the voice of the newspaper. We always strive to take a measured tone in these editorials and reflect the values of our community rather than our own personal opinions.

We also solicit thoughtful commentaries by community members, expressing a number of viewpoints which include both progressive and conservative voices. This week’s paper is a case in point, with opinion pieces by local faith and environmental leaders. And of course, in time-honored tradition, we also print letters from community members.

This week’s letters to the editor section show how thorny a task that can be.

We always have and always will print letters with strong opinions from a variety of viewpoints, but we must draw the line at letters that contain factual misinformation.

Even considering the time constraints presented by our two-person newsroom staff and our heavy workload, we attempt to work with letter writers to fact-check their contributions and correct factual misinformation and verifiable falsehoods. If letter writers decline to remove factual errors, we have no choice but to reject their letters for publication.

As readers might imagine, throughout 2020 and 2021, we have received a number of letters that contain factual misinformation about COVID-19 and COVID vaccines. It would be highly irresponsible of us to amplify, in any way, this type of harmful misinformation. But all misstatements of facts are harmful in that they chip away at truth.

Opinions are different from facts, of course.

Letter writers this week have taken exception to a letter published last week, which objected to a recent Beachcomber editorial that encouraged islanders to ask their healthcare providers and those who provide personal care if they are vaccinated against COVID-19. The letter writer, a longtime and well-known islander, compared The Beachcomber’s stance to the actions of the German Third Reich.

We printed the letter after working with the letter writer to excise misinformation about HIPAA privacy laws, but realizing that his opinion, no matter how objectionable it might be to some, was simply that: an opinion. For all we knew, some other islanders might even agree with it.

But this week, we’ve heard from letter writers who felt his opinion crossed a line. We can see their point. But we also well remember printing extremely heated and even hyperbolic letters from those who opposed the Trump presidency. It seemed fair to us to print this letter writer’s similarly somewhat purple prose.

In any case, in the spirit of supporting the emotional and social health of our community, we would now like to respond to this incident with a call for more civil discourse on these pages. This isn’t social media, where it’s possible to fire off a response and hit “send” without thinking. This is your local newspaper. Your friends, neighbors and their kids read it. More than that, our newspaper is a point of record for Vashon. Please thoughtfully consider what you write to us.

We live in tense times. We have all seen the harm done by angry and misinformed social media posts. We all have read about the rise of unruly and disruptive passengers on public transport in our nation, and about school board meetings attended by mobs of shouting parents.

We’re fortunate that for the most part, Vashon is a civil, mannerly place. Let’s keep our newspaper that way, too.